Respected Economics Professor Dies At 86

January 06, 2004|By LEE FOSTER; Courant Staff Writer

H. John Thorkelson was remembered Monday as a highly respected and popular professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, but he was more than just a brilliant academician, his colleagues said.

``He was a very caring person, a very humane person. John was politically and socially dedicated to the underdog,'' said Peter Barth, chairman of the economics department.

Thorkelson died Dec. 26 after a brief illness. He was 86.

Outside of academic circles, he may be better known as the father of Peter Tork, a member of the 1960s television rock group The Monkees.

Thorkelson believed economics was more than cold numbers. He was interested in the big picture of how the distribution of wealth affected people, and disapproved of economists who were ``only technicians,'' Barth said.

``He believed that economics are much more than the stuff you see coming out of academic economists,'' Barth said.

Thorkelson joined the UConn faculty in 1950 and retired in 1983. Thorkelson, his wife, Virginia, and their children Peter, Nicholas, Chris and Anne lived in Mansfield Center. Virginia ``Ginny'' Thorkelson died in 2002.

John Thorkelson, a Wisconsin native, left Mansfield twice after 1950, once in 1963-64 to live in Caracas, Venezuela, while he served as an economic planner for that country's government. Then in 1966-67, he spent a year at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

While at UConn, he helped to organize the Urban Semester Program, which has sent university students into inner cities to work and learn since 1969.